Alien (1979)

[version]

How old were you when you first saw? Who with? Where?

I had the first four on VHS when I was quite young and one of the PlayStation games. It was just one of those things, like Corpsey and Burial have talked about. Alien / Aliens, Predator and Terminator / Terminator 2 seemed to be real landmarks, even before you saw them. They had an aura.

Of the three, Alien's the one which really seems to have become richer as I've gotten older. There are interesting themes and currents in all three franchises, but that first Alien film's almost endlessly fascinating whereas Terminator's a bit more limited and doesn't have the same pull and Predator's much more shallow than either of them. Alien's got that art object quality whereas the others are very much 'movies', albeit great ones in the case of Aliens and Terminator 1 and 2.

 

[IdleRich]

I saw Aliens first which is why I like it so much I suspect

 

[version]

Firefly

You know Whedon wrote Alien: Resurrection? He's one of the reasons a lot of people hate that film, injecting his goofy banter into the series.

 

[version]

Version tell us about yourself. Why do you think you're so personally invested in the franchise?

I've said it before, possibly even phrased it the same way, but a thread running through a lot of the stuff I like's the kind of thing @mvuent's talked about re: The Backrooms and liminal spaces. A sense of ambiguity, a hint at things out of sight. It's there in Borges and Ballard and Beckett. It's in Alien. It's in Edward Hopper. It's in Lynch, Tarkovsky and Antonioni. I like suggestive environments with little to no people. There's something about an empty space or landscape with a certain kind of lighting or structure that fires my imagination. That's why I like writers like DeLillo and Baudrillard too. They can write the way a Hopper or a Magritte looks. It's something Ballard does brilliantly and explicitly when he both directly and indirectly references Ernst in The Drowned World.

 

[Murphy]

Did mapping computer game landscapes filter in?

Not accusing anyone of gaming, just the shift in cultural reference points between generations in certain instances, how a world is built

Btw so glad Bill P’s vociferous hysteric just got done, the scene’s few minutes sums Aliens up, imagine trying to focus to kill a xenomorph with his mania blabbing constantly, you’d have to blast him too

 

[version]

I think even if you find Paxton's character annoying, he's still a solid character in the sense of actually having an identity. The characters in the later films become pretty bland and interchangeable, barring the leads, whereas more or less everyone in the Cameron film has a personality and the sense of a story behind them.

 

[Murphy]

he has a role within his unit - joker, motion tracking, blabbing

bit one dimensional but as a team the crew work

what I enjoyed with the original was Harry DS and companion bitching about overtime, the loose class/trade specialisms, whereas the sequel it’s the corps, Ripley, Newt, Lance H and the company man trying to coerce multiple creatures

GET AWAY FROM HER YOU BITCH!

 

[version]

Watching clips of the first one again recently I suddenly realised the film literally gets darker as it progresses. The Nostromo's blindingly white at the beginning and by the end's in almost complete darkness, just steam, shadows and sirens. It almost takes on qualities of the derelict once the alien gets on board. That dripping chamber with the clinking chains where Stanton gets got's closer to a cave than part of a spaceship.

 

[version]

IDK trust games are complicated, and I'm not sure I'd do any better in Shaw's place, but I think this is very much a Stupid Monkey film, and that to a large extent, the humans' deaths are the result of a blind faith placed in foreign agents. Think the Captain in Covenant stupidly leaning over the xenomorph egg-sac, despite every nerve-instinct in his body screaming danger at him, because David says it's safe.

There's an over-reliance on authority, on an authority that doesn't have your best interests at heart, that feels symptomatic of modern life in certain ways. Of being a domesticated animal, a dog who trusts his owner because the world's too complicated so he delegates all his reasoning skills, puts his fate in another's hands.

Rem Koolhaas writes (tho he's not always a reliable historical narrator) that when Coney Island burned in the early 1900s, all the circus animals died waited for their trainers to come and direct them, rather than fleeing the flames

From a version of the Alien script.

 

[sus]

Given the above and the influence of Giger and Dali and Bacon and Ernst and Magritte and plenty others on artists in other media, I wonder whether the decline of painting's had a much more severe impact on the imagination than previously thought. That, or I've just missed the people discussing it.

Ive been struck by the paintings you posted above. There are so many visions of how the world fits together or could be

 

[version]

Ive been struck by the paintings you posted above. There are so many visions of how the world fits together or could be

One of the other guys involved in the film, Chris Foss, did art for those great old science fiction book covers. My dad had tons like that. They're brilliant just to look at.

 

[version]

@sus

Something piquing my interest atm's the biomechanical thing. The blurring of the biological-mechanical distinction's obviously the point, but considering the alien in terms of one then the other's intriguing. There's a spectrum from organic parasite to synthetic weapon you can play around with positioning it on. I've mentioned the horror at the thought of nature producing something like that elsewhere, Darwin and his parasitic wasp, but there's also the horror of the perfect machine and that opens up a whole other line of thought where the alien stops being horrifying because it's so different from us and starts being horrifying because it represents the endpoint of a technological trajectory. It's both the wildest of animals and most efficient of machines. As Ash says, "Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility."

I keep thinking of the piping on the alien in relation to a line from Marinetti's Futurist manifesto,

We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath - a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.​

Giger actually used snake bones and bits from a Rolls-Royce when building the thing:

He sculpted the body using plasticine, incorporating pieces such as vertebrae from snakes and cooling tubes from a Rolls-Royce.​

​

 

[version]

I've said it before, possibly even phrased it the same way, but a thread running through a lot of the stuff I like's the kind of thing @mvuent's talked about re: The Backrooms and liminal spaces. A sense of ambiguity, a hint at things out of sight. It's there in Borges and Ballard and Beckett. It's in Alien. It's in Edward Hopper. It's in Lynch, Tarkovsky and Antonioni. I like suggestive environments with little to no people. There's something about an empty space or landscape with a certain kind of lighting or structure that fires my imagination. That's why I like writers like DeLillo and Baudrillard too. They can write the way a Hopper or a Magritte looks. It's something Ballard does brilliantly and explicitly when he both directly and indirectly references Ernst in The Drowned World.

When I watched The Spider's Stratagem, a Bertolucci film based on a Borges story, a year or two ago the most striking thing about it was exactly this. He based the look on paintings by Magritte and de Chirico and the whole thing's done in this dreamlike manner where you're never sure who knows what and whether the town itself is even bound by the laws of physics.

 

[Benny Bunter]

When I watched The Spider's Stratagem, a Bertolucci film based on a Borges story, a year or two ago the most striking thing about it was exactly this. He based the look on paintings by Magritte and de Chirico and the whole thing's done in this dreamlike manner where you're never sure who knows what and whether the town itself is even bound by familiar laws of physics.

It's there in this Prynne too, which explicitly mentions de Chirico. From Memory Working:

 

[Benny Bunter]

That bit near the beginning of Four Quartets too:

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

 

[IdleRich]

When I watched The Spider's Stratagem, a Bertolucci film based on a Borges story, a year or two ago the most striking thing about it was exactly this. He based the look on paintings by Magritte and de Chirico and the whole thing's done in this dreamlike manner where you're never sure who knows what and whether the town itself is even bound by familiar laws of physics.

I must have mentioned La Belle Captive which has a lot of Magritte imagery and is named after one of his paintings I think.

 

[version]

Pynchon wanted de Chirico's Enigma of the Hour for the cover of V.

 

[IdleRich]

Dunno if you remember my pictures from Portuguese towns that reminded me a little of de Chirico. I really love his stuff too, mysterious and eerily windswept, totally derelict and infused with suggestions of whatever happened dusty millennia ago.

Did you ever read Hebdomeros?

 

[version]

Did you ever read Hebdomeros?

No, I was just typing something about that. Have you read it? Is it good? I've never been able to find an English copy online. Maybe I'll have to bite the bullet and buy an actual copy at some point. I've noticed some editions have a John Ashbery preface too.

 

[IdleRich]

Didn't remember this...

The American writer Thomas Pynchon refers to Hebdomeros as a "dream novel" in his own debut novel, V

Maybe I still got the book somewhere

This seminal 1929 surrealist novel by the painter Giorgio de Chirico merges the realms of dream and reality.

In the artist’s only novel, de Chirico invites the reader into a world where language, time, space, and meaning are fluid, highlighting themes of mystery, myth, and the uncanny. Following the titular character Hebdomeros as he embarks on a series of philosophical musings and bizarre experiences divorced from a specific place or time, Hebdomeros embraces ambiguity in a profound exploration of the subconscious mind. Highly visual passages evoke the landscapes and compositions of de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, and non sequiturs mirror the freedom that Surrealism allowed for in art of all categories.

Sounds worth a re-read